István Deák
The Files
...
In 1973, when again in Hungary as an exchange fellow, and while doing
research on the revolutions of 1848, I was suddenly called in to police headquarters
where two polite men in mufti informed me, to the accompaniment of the
inevitable minuscule cup of espresso coffee, that, being guilty of grave crimes
against the People's Republic, I ought to be arrested and tried; but, in view of the
somewhat improved relations between the United States and Hungary, I would
only be expelled. When I tried to inquire about the nature of my crimes, I was told
"to examine my conscience". This I was to do in vain for the next thirty-three years
until I learned, only a few months ago, in a newly uncovered major police report
to the Ministry of Interior, dated December 1976, that "according to irrefutable
evidence" I had been working "for the intelligence service of the Pentagon".
Many questions remain unanswered in my relatively minor case. If I was a
known enemy spy, why did the authorities allow me to spend so much time in the
country, and why were the police looking for me not at my officially registered
address but at a very old address? Why, when expelled for espionage activities,
was I allowed to leave the country in my car, with all my research notes and
microfilms left untouched? And why did the Hungarian ambassador to the United
Nations call me on the phone a short time after my return to New York to invite
me to lunch? There he assured me that the Hungarian academic establishment
was prepared to continue co-operation with the small research institute at
Columbia University of which I was then the director. And yet the 1976 police
report described our research institute as a place "where Deák trains East
European specialists for the diverse branches of the American armed forces."
Following my expulsion, IREX, the American inter-university organization for
cultural exchanges with Eastern Europe, suspended, in protest, the exchange of
research scholars with Hungary. Hasty negotiations followed in neutral Vienna as a
result of which I was asked by the American side to return to Hungary for a short
time. This I did in 1974, in order, as the agreement stated, "to pay a visit to [my] sick
old father." However, the visit turned into a miserable affair, because, unlike a year
earlier, I was being followed during my ten days' stay by hordes of thuggish and highly
conspicuous secret policemen and policewomen. At times, cars and plainclothesmen
blocked both ends of the street where I was so that I had no doubt I would be
arrested. At the airport, when leaving, I was made to undress, and the Swissair plane
was delayed by an hour before the police let me go. Why the thorough search, when
quite obviously, I would not be such a fool as to carry notes or microfilms on me?
Back in 1973, despite my anxious entreaties, the US embassy showed no
interest in my case; a year later, a US diplomat was interested enough to vilify me
to the Hungarian authorities. In a "strictly secret" report to the Foreign Ministry
found in the archives last year, the deputy director of the Hungarian Institute of
Cultural Relations described the visit to his office of the American diplomat.
According to the report the diplomat announced that I had been totally unwilling
to listen to his advice, "not to get in touch with the Hungarian Institute of Cultural
Relations or any other Hungarian institution, but in this, as in any other question,
he was unable to persuade him." In fact, this embassy official, whom I had seen
repeatedly during my brief stay in Budapest, had made fun of my worries about
being persistently followed; despite my repeated requests, he refused to
accompany me to the airport. It is somewhat disconcerting for me to know that
this diplomat is still in service at the State Department.
According to the Hungarian report, the US diplomat declared himself highly
dissatisfied not only with my behaviour, but also with that of Allen H. Kassof and
Ivo Lederer, two American scholars concerned with US- East European cultural
exchanges at that time. Kassof was executive director of IREX, and Lederer worked
for the Ford Foundation. Both had protested my ill treatment in Hungary. "Using
excessively rude and obscene words in reference to Kassof and Lederer," the
report said, the US diplomat complained to the Hungarian Communist official
that, "rather than trusting the magnanimity and flexibility of the Hungarian side"
the two Americans sent a protest note to the Hungarian Institute of Cultural
Relations, without prior consultation with the State Department. According to the
report, the American diplomat claimed that this was "a clear case of East Coast
diplomacy" used "with a definitely provocative purpose".
...
Today's hunt for "the truth" is due to the initiative of several dedicated journalists
and historians, among them Krisztián Ungváry, a youngish historian,
whose excellent The Siege of Budapest, 100 Days in World War II,7 has also
appeared in English. Ungváry seems to have decided to awaken the Hungarian
public to its past shortcomings and crimes whether they occurred under Nazi or
under Communist rule. In many newspaper and journal articles, by hitting both
right and left, at former nationalists and anti-Semites as well as at former
Communists, he urges the culprits to come forward and confess.
Ungváry first established his international reputation by pointing out errors in
the famous Wehrmacht exhibit in Germany, which convincingly demonstrated that
not only the SS but the regular German army enthusiastically engaged in the
execution of the Final Solution. Unfortunately, in its dogmatic zeal, the organizers
of the exhibit charged the German army with crimes that the Soviets or Germany's
Hungarian, Croatian and Finnish allies had committed.
One of Ungváry's practices is to classify the degree of guilt of former police
informers; I am certain that he would list "Vili" among those of relatively good will.
Today there is, however, a growing backlash to Ungváry's activities; he is being
accused of opening old wounds and playing the inquisitor. One must note here that
many of the available police files contain few or no personal letters and signed
statements by the informers; what one usually gets is documents showing what the
informers' handlers were telling their superiors. Lawsuits for defamation are already
on the horizon; the very legality of publicizing the names of former informers is
being questioned. Hungarian law allows the publication of negative information
only about a public personality, but it is unclear whether a young cleric or a student
is to be considered a public personality just because later he became a cardinal or a
world famous film director. And is it right to expose their names in connection with
acts they had committed thirty or forty years earlier and which were not punishable
by law? Nor are they punishable today. Yet let us also remember that, after World
War II in Europe, thousands upon thousands of people were imprisoned, and many
hanged, for having informed on their neighbours to the Gestapo.
Krisztián Ungváry's most shattering find has been to identify László Paskai, the
former archbishop of Esztergom- Budapest, as an informer when he was still a
head teacher in a seminary. Aware of the awesome significance of unmasking
someone who, between 1987 and his retirement in 2002, occupied Hungary's
foremost ecclesiastic position, Ungváry went out of his way to assure the public
that Paskai's reports on his fellow priests were innocuous. Still, the import of the
revelation is enormous; Paskai, after all, is a cardinal, and he headed a see that,
after World War II, had been held by Cardinal József Mindszenty, the very symbol
of defiance to Communist rule. In 1948, Mindszenty was arrested, tortured and, in
one of history's most notorious show trials, was made to confess to trumped-up
charges. The archbishop of Esztergom, now called Archbishop of Esztergom-
Budapest, traditionally bore the additional title of "Prince Primate of Hungary" and
was considered among the highest dignitaries of the realm.
Paskai served as a police informer between 1967 and 1974, eventually earning
the distinction of the acronym 'tbm', an informer who serves the Communist cause
out of ideological commitment and dedication. Yet even when he was no longer
in police service, he made himself odious to many Catholics for cracking down
on the so-called "basis communities", small assemblies of the faithful, led by
refractory clergymen, who attempted to worship without taking cognizance of the
regime and of the church hierarchy. Archbishop Paskai's situation resembled that
of most other church leaders in Hungary where, unlike in Poland, the churches,
whether Catholic, Protestant, or the Jewish congregation, were suffering from a
decline in popular religiosity. As a result, the high clergy depended on the good
will and the financial generosity of the Party. Having been ruthlessly crushed in
the early years of Communism, church leaders readily took an oath to the Communist constitution; and many among them became what I like to call the trained
seals of the regime.
The Catholic Church has many defenders who point out that the clergy had to
survive, and that Paskai and the other bishops, several among whom are today
similarly incriminated, assured a continuity which allowed for the Church's revival
following the fall of Communism. After all, in Communist countries, the government
had the right to veto appointments to higher clerical offices. Yet the Church's
critics are more than right in arguing that the churches should have shown a good
example in the one-party state or, at least, the higher clergy should publicly repent
today for its most un-heroic behavior.8
Few of the police informers have repented. One of István Szabó's former
classmates, for instance, came forward publicly, although only following the
publicizing of Szabó's misdeeds, to confess that he, too, had been a police informer.
Most of the former agents who have been publicly exposed content themselves with
such excuses as, for instance, those of a former director at the Hungarian National
Bank, who claimed that it was a sudden outburst of anti-Semitism during the
revolution of 1956 which had driven him into the arms of the police.
Somehow no one in Hungary was surprised that artists, journalists and
clergymen figured high on the list of Communist police informers, but few
expected the same of members of the great historic families. Aristocrats have been
the traditional targets of envy and ridicule, but during Communist times they
earned public respect for their dignity under adversity. Obviously, not all titled
nobles, a few hundred families in all, acted dotty during the interwar years, nor
were they all heroes under the Communism; nevertheless the popular image had
become widespread of strange tall men and women with aquiline noses, who did
not sound their r's in speech, and who lived uncomplainingly with their large
broods in the servants' quarters of their former estates or who worked diligently
as gardeners and unskilled labourers. Of all the titled families none has been more
exalted than the Esterházys, princes and counts, who owned one thirtieth of
Greater Hungary. Recently, they produced self-respecting prisoners in Communist
concentration camps, a famous soccer player, and one of Hungary's greatest
novelists, Péter Esterházy, at least seven of whose major works have also
appeared in English. In 1999, Esterházy completed Celestial Harmonies,9 a major
literary tribute to his father, and to all the fathers in the Esterházy family, in which
the present and the past appear simultaneously in the strangest of combinations
and whose hero is Mátyás Esterházy, the writer's incorruptible and long suffering
father. On 28 January, 2000, however, ten weeks before the book's publication, a researcher put a large collection of documents in the author's hands, proving that
Mátyás Esterházy, by then dead, had functioned as a prolific police informer all
the way from 1957 to 1980. This, in turn, led to Péter Esterházy's Improved
Edition: an Attachment to Celestial Harmonies,10 which unfortunately does not yet
exist in English and in which the writer settles accounts with his own naiveté and
explains, but never excuses, the father's behaviour. Interestingly, the public seems
more than ready to forgive Mátyás Esterházy, of whom his own son writes in
Improved Edition: "My father betrayed us, himself, his family [and] his fatherland."
By the 1970s, when I was expelled from Hungary, the police often seemed
hesitant to proceed against those it described as enemies. Five years after my
expulsion, I became a member of the presidential delegation that took the Holy
Crown of Saint Stephen, hitherto kept at Fort Knox, back to Hungary as a mark of
President Carter's appreciation of Hungary's having few, if any, political prisoners.11
As I learned later, the security police were furious about the prospects of my
return but were not permitted to refuse me a visa. They took their revenge by not
allowing my name to be mentioned in the media; yet, thereafter, I was always
admitted to my native country. Moreover, György Aczél, the Party's cultural
plenipotentiary, sent me a note of thanks "for my patriotic behaviour"; or as a
Hungarian political policeman later explained to an émigré friend of mine, "by
helping to return the Crown, Deák has redeemed his sins."
In János Kádár's goulash communism, which followed upon the brutal
persecution, by the same János Kádár, of the fighters and intellectual lights of the
1956 Revolution, the police gradually lost their independent status. They were no
longer a state within the state as it had been the case in Stalinist times. By the
1970s, the police were largely subordinated to the minister of interior, as
elsewhere in Europe. The minister himself was under the control of the Political
Bureau of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party.
Let me illustrate the weakening of the political police's influence by citing the
case of Sándor Szalai, a Hungarian sociologist, who was between 1966 and 1972 the
deputy director of UNITAR, the UN's training and research institute. The major police
report of December 1976 that I have already mentioned in this article described him
as a sworn enemy of the Hungarian People's Republic and, incidentally, as a close
friend of mine. Yet the same report stated casually that this enemy, who had caused so much trouble to the regime, was now back in Hungary, teaching at Budapest
University. There was not even a suggestion that Szalai should be arrested,
something that would have taken place automatically in earlier, Stalinist times.12
Or, there is the case of the "Historian," one of Hungary's most celebrated
historians, whom the secret police report describes as a potentially superb source
of information on the US and other countries but who, the police regretfully note,
"refuses to co-operate with us." More than that, the "Historian" even complained
to influential contacts in the Party Central Committee about his having been
inconvenienced by the political police.
István Deák
is an American historian born in Hungary. He teaches modern Central and East European
history at Columbia University. His books on Weimar Germany's left-wing intellectuals,
the 1848 Revolution in Hungary, the officer corps of the Habsburg Monarchy and Hitler's
Europe have appeared in English, German and Hungarian.
